Open Spaces, Kansas City’s 10-week, citywide arts event, opens this weekend, and Mayor James and the Open Spaces team are celebrating with you, your neighbors and gigantic puppets! At 11:30 AM on SATURDAY, 8/25, music will flow in Swope Park’s Village, food trucks will await you, and 40 dancers and 15-foot high artists will amaze the crowd!
More Opening Week Events…
The Open Spaces Village
August 26th is the first SUNDAY of Open Spaces! Free art prints right off the etching press; Shakespearean improvisations; group strategy games; a clay sculpture workshop and big band jazz —all free, and all surrounded by world-class art installations and the beauty of Swope Park!
Junkyard Orchestra and opening celebration.
After the WOW of a giant puppet performance at 11:30, after lunch from your favorite food truck and a look at world-class artworks around Swope Park, put your creative rhythm in the hands of The Junkyard Orchestra! The Bolivian- American duo plays on the Open Spaces Village Stage, SATURDAY, 8/25 at 3:15.
Kids and Village Weekends
Get the kids out-of-doors and into Open Spaces every weekend through October! Every Sunday afternoon, August 25th through October 15th, the Swope Park Village hosts a different all-ages arts workshop, for free. Fuel their imaginations and let them run with the great art of Open Spaces all around.
Junkyard Orchestra
The Junkyard Orchestra transports audiences with South American mountain rhythms on one-of–a-kind instruments. Hear them for free on SATURDAY, 8/25, the first, official day of Open Spaces KC Art Experience! The Mayor’s Ribbon Cutting is at 11:30 AM and art and music happen all afternoon!
Poetry for Personal Power/ P3
At 1 PM on SATURDAY, 8/25, the voices of P3 poets will lead Kansas City on journeys of the spoken word! The artists recapture the power of voice which once made Poetry the art of all arts. P3’s personal power will launch our city’s 10-week arts phenomenon, Open Spaces, on its opening day, 8/25. Find Poetry for Personal Power on the Village Stage in Swope Park!
NuBlvckCity
The music of NuBlvckCity rides the fast moving waters of our black community’s art and culture. Their lyrics pick up Kansas City’s hip-hop and blues, spoken word and soul food on a great wave of live voice and instrumentation. Soak up the sound of KC in the Village in Swope Park on SATURDAY, 8/25 at 4:30 PM.
Karen McCoy’s Sound and Sight Walk
- Take a hike with sound and sight artist Karen McCoy in Swope Park’s forest, and feel your senses grow stronger. SATURDAY, 8/25, McCoy’s Sound and Sight Walk leaves Lakeside Nature Center at 4 PM. Wear long pants, shirtsleeves, ankle socks and hiking shoes for a transformative, deep woods experience. Space is limited.
- Intensify your sense of Nature on a Sound and Sight Walk with artist Karen McCoy! On SATURDAY, 8/25, the 4 PM walk will leave on time from Lakeside Nature Center. Wear long pants, shirtsleeves, ankle socks and hiking shoes for a transformative, deep woods experience. Space is limited.
The Kansas City Jazz Orchestra
- Don’t miss the rare, big band performance of jazz legend, Marylou Williams’ historic composition, Zodiac Suite! The famous 12-part piece will grace the air at the Swope Park Village on SUNDAY, 8/26 from 4:30 to 6PM, when the Kansas City Jazz Orchestra plays!
- On SUNDAY, 8/26 from 4:30 to 6PM the Swope Park Village will be a theater of swing. The Kansas City Jazz Orchestra sets the scene and lights up song like no other band in the city.
Triangle Learning Programs for Open Spaces: Registration Now Open.
Do you want to learn more about contemporary art? Open Spaces invites you to join a relaxing artist-led workshop and learn more about Open Spaces artworks while you experiment with art of your own. To register for a small group, Triangle Learning Program, go to openspaceskc.com/education.
Kids Corner arts workshops for the young and young at heart happen each Sunday of Open Spaces in the Village in Swope Park. Find upcoming workshops on the Village Schedule at openspaceskc.com.
Exploring Open Spaces
Elizabeth Schurman — Open Spaces Village, Exhibition Artist
Do you ever feel nervous about doing things wrong or worry how others will judge your performance? Better question: do you ever STOP worrying about those things? Open Spaces wants you to experience art without those worries and, believe it or not, there’s an artistic genre that practices not worrying about doing stuff wrong! It’s an art form called TASK. Open Spaces arts organizer Elizabeth Schurman is hosting a TASK party at 2:30 PM, on SUNDAY, 8/26 in the Open Spaces Village in Swope Park. You are cordially invited! Who-Knows-Who will accomplish tasks using who-knows-what materials, and the improvised outcome will be a celebration of Creative Freedom. Come try it. And relax: you can’t go wrong.
Stone Lion Puppets Inspiration performance
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” Picasso posed a problem that KC’s Heather Nisbett-Loewenstein has solved for decades with a brilliant mix of theater, community and giant puppets. For more than 25 years, her company, Stone Lion Puppets, has drawn huge crowds of all ages in Kansas City and other points across the globe. Stone Lion performances hold imagination to childhood dimensions: everything is BIG! Open Spaces opens on 8/25 with a Swope Park ribbon cutting ceremony and puppet-centered masterwork: Inspiration. Forty dancers will fling streams of color and move with towering puppets over the stage and through the ribbon-cutting party. Phenomenal Open Spaces performances and artworks will follow all afternoon and throughout the 9-week exhibition. Imagine that! SATURDAY, 8/25 11:30 AM in The Open Spaces Village in Swope Park.
Michael Schonhoff — Westwood Park, Exhibition Artist
“Formalist Art” looks deeply at the shapes around us — the edges, angles and depth of things. A formalist sculpture by Kansas City’s Michael Schonhoff moves into its Open Spaces home this week in Westwood Park, a rectangular, open space whose west side is State Line Road. Neighbors from all sides of Westwood Park, along with the rest of Kansas City, cross that road thousands of times every day. With Schonhoff’s new artwork, our two state city might “Where in that road is our legal line?” or “How far underfoot does the state line extend?” With his new work, Deep States, Schonhoff dives into the forms of the Missouri and Kansas boundaries, and by way of those forms, opens the question of how legal lines shape us. You’ll find Deep States, by the way, on the “Show-Me State” side of the road.
Karen McCoy — Swope Park, Exhibition Artist
Kansas City artist Karen McCoy presents a series of artist-led Sound and Sight Walks on Swope Park’s Fox Hollow Trail throughout Open Spaces. To walk with McCoy from the limestone outcrops near the Lakeside Nature Center, down, into Fox Hollow, along the creek, then up a series of rises to the outcrops again, takes about an hour. In that time, you upgrade the quality of your inner sound system, and the trickle of a stream becomes a musical performance. McCoy quietly asks, can you hear how some of the water is falling but another part is rushing over? Yes, you can hear this: you carry a wooden, handcrafted cone, eight or so inches long, to help you hear and see in wonderful detail. This is not IMAX or ear buds: the technology is mostly in you. But the cone helps: hold its small end in your ear and search the woods. Turn it around and peek into its bell to isolate a bright detail of nature through its tiny opening. Alternating listening and looking, and, pausing in forest theaters with the artist, you notice how the shape of land, density of forest and distance from human traffic, change not just sound and sight, but every other feeling, too. You’ll need to bring ten things for the walk: Five senses (including taste, for wild ginger!) ankle socks, hiking shoes, long pants, long sleeves, and a hat.
Dawn DeDeaux’s FREE FALL: Prophecy and Free Will in Milton’s Paradise Lost is currently being installed in Swope Park
“This horror will grow mild, this darkness light.” The poet John Milton lived in England during dramatic political ups and downs. His perspective on society and the human drama inspires the New Orleans artist, Dawn DeDeaux, whose artwork is also known for its wide-reaching vision of society. She reminds us of Milton’s insights on our trials, triumphs and failures in her new, towering and tumbling work for Open Spaces. FREE FALL: Prophecy and Free Will in Milton’s Paradise Lost debuts in Swope Park this week, and DeDeaux’s classical columns, leaning this way and that, will speak from slopes and roadsides about the survival of human society over the ages. Up close, you’ll see that each column is covered in reflective letters quoting Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost. As you drive on the park’s main avenues, you’ll see DeDeaux’s columns tracing the ups and downs of the city landscape like the rises and falls of civilization.
Open Spaces Vignettes
Paul Anthony Smith — Haw Gallery West Bottoms, Exhibition Artist
It’s easy to find your way to the Haw Gallery, down the 12th Street Viaduct and along wide avenues of the West Bottoms. The airy rooms inside the Haw lead you to a well-lighted gallery where Open Spaces welcomes three, large mixed-media prints by Paul Anthony Smith. Then, movement gets complicated. Bang Bim, Only in America and two other works by Smith stop you short with chain-link fencing spray-painted on their surfaces. The photographed scenery beyond every fence looks familiar — sky and land, streets and people— but when you peer through each panel’s diagonal grid work and into its imagery, the distance between you and what you look at continually shifts. A gentleman looking back at you from one of the photos might have seen you staring from behind the chain-links: is the fence in his world or yours? From his street, your eye moves to a nearby landscape, flipped, but unmistakable, although its graveyard is hanging from the sky. The more you look, the more you feel the act of looking unhinge and, at the same time, feel yourself drawn in to a real time and place. This interior gallery of the Haw has three clever windows on a world that used to be familiar.
The Jamaican born, New York-based artist, trained at Kansas City Art Institute, is masterful with texturing surfaces. Stepping close, you find that a cinderblock wall you’ve been “looking through” is made of thousands of tiny rips on the print itself. With this technique of picotage and other surprising surface treatments, the paper on the wall and the places in its images become mixed up. Are you looking at something “here” or “there”? You wander back to the expanses of the West Bottoms, move through ample avenues, simple rooflines and a big sky; and your eyes have to ask, “What do you make of all that distance?”
Rina Banerjee’s Supercolonies: the Ant, the Serpent and the Mound, in the Crossroads
Many artworks in the Open Spaces Exhibition feel like they grow from Kansas City — our walls, streets, waterways and woods. Rina Banerjee’s Supercolonies: the Ant, the Serpent and the Mound, brings a city from another place to our own, allowing us to see Kansas City with new (and ancient) perspective. The Calcutta, India- born, New York-based artist brings the traditional wisdom of the giant, white ant mound to an industrial building in the Crossroads District. If this cultural transfer sounds odd at first, Banerjee’s work proves she’s an expert in crossing cultures and is deeply aware of her work’s Kansas City context. Termite towers of India and Tibet are revered centers of order, labor and vitality. They remind us that what is built from the Earth requires constant renewal. In Indian tradition, the mounds are sacred centers of creativity, imbued by stories and artworks for thousands of years. Banerjee’s new, Kansas City sculpture captures the messages of the anthill in a decorated, amber glass mound, protected by glass serpents. Nearby, new dreamlike paintings by Banerjee draw us into the mythical space of her Supercolonies sculpture.
While the anthill’s mythology may seem exotic, Supercolonies is not a departure from Kansas City. Its transformation of the Marietta Chair building’s lobby is made of wine bottles pulled from Kansas City recycling bins, and Depression-era, amber glass plates from our antique markets. It reveres our industrial histories and our place in the natural world. Banerjee’s intricate, glass mound combines East and West, ancient and modern, to ask how Kansas City creates its own myths, rituals and sacred spaces. How do we imagine the ground where we continually renew our city? For those who step into its world, Supercolonies: the Ant, the Serpent and the Mound will flow from Hindu tradition into new, Middle American meaning.
Rashawn Griffin — Installation in the Haw Gallery West Bottoms, Exhibition Artist
What is installation art? Great artworks are pouring into KC park spaces, neighborhoods, businesses and galleries for the Open Spaces KC Arts Experience; and with them we often hear the word “installation.” It’s clearly more than putting a fixture in place! I thought I knew about Installation Art when I called Open Spaces artist Rashawn Griffin for an interview about his new work. Griffin, a Kansas native with an MFA in sculpture from Yale, had surprisingly few words for me about his installation. The artist explained that to speak about an installation, he has to speak about the place where it’s installed. The site for his work recently changed to the Haw Gallery, and when we spoke, the artist was waiting to install in the new site. He said that installations are “reflexive” art works “that are responding to their space.“ and “everything depends on that place.”
Griffin’s Everything-Nothing is one of the opportunities Open Spaces will offer us all, for rediscovering what ”place” means in Kansas City. Installation Art is “an immersive experience,” the artist told me from his studio in Olathe, where he waited to install his elaborately fabricated room – within – a – room. Even though Mr. Griffin very politely made this clear to me, I tried to coax him to say what the work might come to mean and how the public might react to it. “Until the work is in place,” Griffin insisted, “I really can’t say anything about it.” After our call, I knew I had learned about “Installation” from a purist. What’s more, I felt excited for Everything-Nothing: a surprise in store!
–Anne Gatschet, Open Spaces
